Memoir of an Offbeat Clan Strikes a Chord

By MEL GUSSOW

Published: June 5, 2001

When Dorothy Gallagher was writing ''How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories,'' she expected that this memoir of her family -- politically radical Jewish immigrants to the United States from Ukraine -- would have limited appeal. In a recent interview, she said she assumed that it would fall into the ''black hole'' of disappearing books, as had her two previous biographies. To her surprise, it has struck a common chord in people from vastly different backgrounds. As she said, ''Protestants from the Midwest are saying, 'You're writing about my family.' ''

Ms. Gallagher's story is an evocative chronicle of a large family filled with rivalries and recriminations, holding grudges forever but bound by an emotional as well a genealogical DNA. In her review in The New York Times Book Review, Laura Shaine Cunningham stressed the universality of the work: ''Readers who relish the truth -- served straight up, 120 proof -- will be intoxicated by her book and will accept her inheritance as their own.''

Speaking about her parents, Bella and Isadore Rosen, and other relatives, she said: ''They were my gods when I was growing up. They were brave, they were quarrelsome, they were part of a spectacular generation. I hope the book is saying that I love them because I did.''

That love is not obvious, at least not in the first chapter, which is a graphic account of the decline and death of her parents. Sinking into dementia, her father is fooled by a con man. And her mother seems to be living in her own dream world. When the author visits her in a nursing home, Bella says, ''But darling, how did you find me?''

Throughout the book, Ms. Gallagher embraces irony and avoids sentimentality. What also helps sustain her equilibrium under stress is the hearty humor that is endemic to the extended family and to the book itself.

The Rosens and their relatives are a colorful clan, beginning with Aunt Lily, who was unlucky in love and sold lingerie door to door to prostitutes, figuring with native shrewdness that they were the only women who could afford silk and lace underwear in hard times. There are also family tragedies: Cousin Meyer, who went back to Russia and then returned to the United States, wrote his autobiography and committed suicide at 87, and a family friend who was murdered in her apartment in the East Bronx.

At the center of the memoir are Ms. Gallagher's parents, who arrived in the United States as teenagers and worked long hours running a series of garages. Because her father could not afford an assistant, her mother would fill in for him during off hours. She couldn't drive and knew nothing about cars, but that didn't stop her from telling customers: ''Leave your car. I can't get to it right now.'' Sometimes a customer would barter for repairs: one left a goat as payment.

Throughout the book there is a feeling of solidarity and support from her mother. When Ms. Gallagher published her first book, ''Hannah's Daughters,'' her mother said, ''Daddy and I are very proud of you, even if Daddy has never mentioned it.''

Ms. Gallagher said she did not set out to write a full memoir, but simply wrote a story about her parents: ''I tried to make order out of the total chaos of the last five years of their lives.'' Then her husband, the writer and editor Ben Sonnenberg, persuaded her that she had more stories to tell. ''By the time I had done three,'' she said, ''I knew I could do a book.''

Most of the narrative takes place before her time or in her early childhood. For background, she had a few letters and Cousin Meyer's 90-page unpublished manuscript. Everything else she calls hearsay, tales told and retold and then reimagined.

The family shared a passion for politics. ''I don't know if my mother was an actual member of the Communist Party,'' Ms. Gallagher said, ''but my father was at some point, probably in the 1920's. He was not somebody who liked following orders, so I think he dropped out by the 1930's.''

Looking back, she said: ''It was a generation of people who had come from Russia. Being Jews in Russia was to suffer anti-Semitism. It was also a time when people believed in utopias. The revolution promised heaven on earth.'' The favorite journal in the household was The Daily Worker.

The Rosens lived in Washington Heights ''among people they knew from the old country.'' It was, she said, ''a narrow world, and yet the stage on which life was to be played out was the international working class.'' At the same time, the book remains intimate, as Ms. Gallagher searches for an understanding of herself and her place in the family.

In the book she deals glancingly with her own adult life. Expanding on those observations, she talked about her first job working for a company called Magazine Management, along with two aspiring writers, Bruce Jay Friedman and Mario Puzo. Her role was to make up interviews with celebrities for fan magazines. One of her favorites was an article about the actress Mai Britt's having married Sammy Davis Jr., which she titled, ''Mai Britt Reveals 'Why I Married a Man Shorter Than I Am.' '' That led her to Modern Screen and, eventually, Redbook.

A Redbook article about a 99-year-old woman and her family in Tacoma, Wash., became the genesis of ''Hannah's Daughters.'' That was followed by ''All the Right Enemies,'' about the life and murder of the anarchist Carlo Tresca. Writing that book, she realized that she loved doing research because it was ''like detective work.'' To her chagrin, her editor rejected the book, calling it unpublishable. Bought by another house, it received a glowing review from Alfred Kazin in The New York Times Book Review.

Although neither book was a financial success, she decided that biography was a near-perfect form because it ''allows you to draw in close to a subject and also back away for an overview'' of the time. In her memoir, she said, she strove for ''the kind of detachment that I brought to biography,'' writing from ''a middle distance'' so that background and foreground were in sharp focus.

When she wrote ''Hannah's Daughters,'' she said, she knew more about the history of the family in that book than she did about the history of her own family. That is no longer true, but it was only after her parents and other relatives of their generation died that she could write their story -- ''when all those larger figures in my life were gone.''

Asked what her father would have said about her book, she replied, ''He would not have read it, and if he had he would not have been happy with it.'' Because her parents are dead, she was free to ''do what I like with them,'' she said. What she has done is to bring them back to life, and in so doing to acknowledge the importance of her inheritance.

Photo: The writer Dorothy Gallagher on the Lower East Side, where she used to live. (Alan Chin for The New York Times)